Soon you'll be able to protect your four-legged friends from pollution

They're designing pollution masks for smog dogs, people

By Robyn StrachanPosted: Tuesday March 14 2017 12:19PM

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Despite the near-constantfuror about the pollution in Beijing, we'd never really sat down and thought about the sinister smog's effects on our furry companions before.

This is pretty ridiculous when you consider that – because they're blimmin' mammals – they poo and sleep and eat the same as us, so of course they're going to experience negative effects from breathing toxic air.

They also deserve to get the best out of Beijing.

However, the bright sparks at Cambridge Mask Company actually used their common sense and had the brainwave that yes, in fact, dogs probably shouldn't be exposed to high AQI levels. Because of this, they've put their paws to the grindstone and started to develop a line of high-quality snout masks for dogs.

At this current moment in time there seems to be no intention to expand the line to include fluffy friends of the feline variety. Having given a cat anti-tick medication and been mauled for the privilege, we assume that this is less because the Cambridge mask masters couldn't give two whiskers about kitties, but more because trying to get a pollution mask on a cat and have them keep it on would be a task of roughly the same difficulty as teaching them to turn the air purifier on themselves.

Having seen dog owners struggle to bodge a solution from human pollution masks, which were redundant 'as they fitted poorly and looked uncomfortable for the pets wearing them', she decided that a more sensible solution was needed.

Mary told us that 'ICVS is already a retailer for Cambridge Masks so we knew the products well and that they were effective. I thought it would be great idea to work with a reputable mask manufacturer to develop air pollution masks specifically for dogs.' Definitely something we can get behind.

They'll hopefully look better than these snazzy World War Two numbers.

The masks will hopefully be on the market by next winter, before the worst excesses of the pollution come into play, and we'd suggest treating yourself to a matching one in one of the funky designs that Cambridge are renowned for and, in the world's hairiest parody of Ab Fab, looking fabulous, dahhling.